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“... referred to his rebel forces as the ‘Khmers noirs’. At the time, French public opinion made short shrift of small-scale military interventions in Africa. In June 1992 I alerted readers to what the Libération headline called ‘The Elysée’s Secret War’ in Rwanda – a deployment which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no ...”

“... The essential decency of the bigot isn’t a theme Houellebecq can bring off, certainly at such short notice.By this stage​ of the novel the point of view has moved erratically away from Paul. Sometimes there seems no good reason for this shift, or drift, especially when Paul is in the room, as is the case when his boss, Bruno Juge, the finance ...”

“... from his collected works, however unflattering a light it casts on him. What is going on? A short extract from Advertisements for Myself explains the method in this madness: ‘I have been running for American President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind,’ the author says in a rare first-person appearance. ‘The sour truth is that I am ...”

“... loyal support of the Crown during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and they engaged the lawyer Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English ...”

“... both of broad issue and of instructive detail, in this volume than I can possibly indicate in a short review. The separate chapters, on topics as diverse as ‘The Development of Commercial Science Journals in Victorian Britain’ or ‘The Changing Appearance of Research Journals in Science and Technology’, will take their place as distinctive ...”

“... So Peterloo was incorporated into the Liberal as well as the Chartist pedigree: in 1874 a short account of it was published in Manchester as a Liberal election leaflet, and ‘Peterloo’ was the inscription on a memorial jug that John Bright preserved at One Ash throughout his life. Nor is the line from Hunt to Chartism as clear or as simple as ...”

“... have ever been settled. Whether arranged alphabetically by first line, like The ‘Garland’ of Philip, or by subject and date, like Verse and Worse and The Stuffed Owl, the Anthology has always seemed less than the sum of its parts. Indeed its Byzantine title concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may ...”

“... with the attempted secession of eastern Nigeria. Food assistance undoubtedly saves lives in the short run, but in the longer term it is just as likely to prolong hostilities by becoming entangled with the war economy. ‘Most thoughtful relief workers see humanitarian action as a neutral stop-gap,’ de Waal writes, but ‘for the victims of famine, it can ...”

“... the hero travels to Hades to find that death has undone all the pointless hierarchies of life: Philip of Macedon is stitching rotten sandals to earn money, Xerxes is begging, and so on. But the point is made clear earlier on, when Menippus tells us that, on earth, things have become sadly inverted: ‘On observation I found these same people practising the ...”

“... Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for ...”

“... skin between each sheet of paper, you align them bottom edge and long side, tapping the long and short sides sharply together on the surface of your desk, and if you type sharply you can get as many as six or eight copies, each slightly fainter than the one before.) Refills and spares. A cornucopia of everything you would never run out of. Paper glued into ...”

“... ancient world, was a myth. But Sand also endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems ...”

“... In the Loop. How quickly Blair’s pose became exposed. As early as June 2000, his pet pollster Philip Gould was reporting their focus groups as saying that ‘TB is not believed to be real. He lacks conviction, he is all spin and presentation.’ It is a bitter irony that this image of him became fixed in the public mind just as he was beginning to embark ...”

“... in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and ...”

“... the Accademia in Venice. The shape of the panels is crucial. Each is 35 inches high and a little short of 16 inches wide; originally they may have been a few inches taller top and bottom. The tallness and narrowness seem meant to amplify the idea of elevation in panels one and two – Terrestrial Paradise is followed by a scene in which the elect are ...”